The July Bolshevik putsch has not yet found an authoritative historian. Many key documents have been published under the editorship of D. A. Chugaev, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v iiule 1917 g. [The Revolutionary Movement in Russia in July 1917] (Moscow, 1959). There is a great deal of information on this event as well as on other Bolshevik activities during 1917 in the recollections of the head of Kerensky’s counterintelligence, Colonel B. Nikitin, Rokovye gody (Paris, 1937) (in English: The Fateful Years, London, 1938).
John L. H. Keep’s The Russian Revolution (London, 1976) analyzes the social changes in Russia in 1917–18.
D. A. Chugaev edited a collection of documents on the Kornilov Affair under the title Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v avguste 1917 g.: Razgrom Kornilovskogo miatezha [The Revolutionary Movement in Russia in August 1917: The Crushing of Kornilov’s Mutiny] (Moscow, 1959). Of the secondary accounts, the best are by E. I. Martynov, Kornilov (Leningrad, 1927) (hostile to Kornilov), and George Katkov, The Kornilov Affair (London-New York, 1980) (friendly).
The October coup is imperfectly reflected in the heavily doctored minutes of the Central Committee: Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b): avgust 1917-fevral’ 1918 [Protocols of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks): August 1917-February 1918] (Moscow, 1958). Of the histories, outstanding are S. P. Melgunov’s, Kak bol’sheviki zakhvatili vlasf [How the Bolsheviks Seized Power] (Paris, 1953) (an English condensation: The Bolshevik Seizure of Power, Santa Barbara, Calif., 1972) and Robert V. Daniels’s Red October (New York, 1967; London, 1968).
For the Communist dictatorship, an indispensable source is the decrees (not entirely complete) published as Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1957), of which at the time of writing 13 volumes have appeared. Leonard Schapiro’s The Origin of the Communist Autocracy, 2nd ed. (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1977), traces the rise of the one-party dictatorship into the early 1920s. There is a reasonably good Communist account of the same process, seen from a very different perspective, by M. P. Iroshnikov, Sozdanie sovetskogo tsentral’nogogosudarstvennogo apparata [The Creation of the Soviet Central State Apparatus], 2nd ed. (Leningrad, 1967). Trotsky’s Stalinskaia shkola fal’sifikatsii [The Stalin School of Falsification] (Berlin, 1932) has important documentation not available elsewhere.
On the Constituent Assembly, there are the memoirs of its Secretary, M. V. Vishniak, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobrante [The All-Russian Constituent Assembly] (Paris, 1932), and an identically titled monograph by the Soviet historian O. N. Znamenskii, published in Leningrad in 1976.
The story of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty by J. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace (London-New York, 1956), although first published over half a century ago, has still not been superseded. There are important documents on German-Soviet relations in Vol. I of Sovetsko-Germanskie Otnosheniia [Soviet-German Relations] (Moscow, 1968). The tangled story of German-Russian relations in 1918 is told authoritatively by Winfried Baumgart in Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918 [Germany’s Ostpolitik in 1918] (Vienna-Munich, 1966).
The Czech uprising is recounted by M. Klante, Von der Wolga zum Amur [From the Volga to the Amur] (Berlin-Königsberg, 1931).
There are no satisfactory treatments of either the Left SR uprising or Savinkov’s rising in Iaroslavl.
